IMPACT: How a single article sparks big change

Behind ‘impact journalism’ are the people who write it, and what the readers do next

It’s happened to nearly all of us at some point. Whether leafing through our daily newspaper, or reading it online, one story just sort of ‘jumps out’. We might even cut it out, or share the link with a friend. But some ‘ordinary’ readers go further than that, and end up starting something much, much bigger.

What does a fair trade store in France, a charity ball in New York and a bank in Chile all have in common? A well-told, well-timed story. This is what happened when a businessman, a campaigning mom and a disenchanted banker all chanced across news articles that sparked something unexpected.

Coffee

Tristan Lecomte was getting bored at his desk-job at French multinational L’Oréal when his sister tore out a two-page spread for him from one of the newspapers sold by the homeless, Le Réverbère. It was about coffee, and something called fair trade, which Lecomte had never heard of. “At the time, I remember thinking it was kind of odd to mix ethics with business, and I buried the article in the bottom of a drawer,” he says.

That was back in 1998. Some months later, he quit his job to start his own business with his university mates: they tossed around the idea of fair trade, brainstormed how to apply it, and finally ended up founding the first fair trade store in France, Alter Eco. After a rocky start, the company now distributes products to major retail stores around the world, including the United States, Australia and Brazil, certifying respectable wages and working conditions for the producers of the goods.

Congo

A very different story is that of Jennifer Williams, from an affluent suburb in Westchester County, New York. A former banker turned mom, Williams sat down to catch up on the news one Sunday not long after she had had her second son. Opening the front page of the New York Times to a story about rape in the Congo, Williams was shocked: “Why had I never heard about women and children of the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose lives were being ripped apart by unimaginable violence?” she says.

She sent the article out to her group of power-mom friends, and shot off an email to the author, Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, for advice on what she could do to help. He got back to her and put her in touch with some key figures—such as playwright Eve Ensler and her foundation, V-Day, which was planning the construction of a special retreat center for rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, called the City of Joy. Williams and her friends began to hatch plans for an up-scale benefit called Women of the Congo, inviting speakers like Gettleman and Ensler, but also actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Glenn Close. That first gala in 2008 became an annual event, and Williams and her friends have now managed to raise $250,000, or about one-third of the total funds needed for the construction and operation of the City of Joy hospital wing in Bukavu, which opened its doors in July 2012.

“It’s a massive undertaking, but I liked the challenge,” Williams says. Before getting involved with V-Day, she had never done anything like this before. “There are a million causes, but it feels great to know that I’ve made a difference in one,” she adds. “We read about an issue, we were touched by it, we wanted to do something. And we did. There’s no better feeling than that.”

Some journalists strive to have exactly this effect: one of them is Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times columnist Nick Kristof. “We’re in the lighting business,” he says of journalists. “And by and large our power comes from shining a spotlight on something that would otherwise be neglected.”

Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn set off on a global trip to report on the subject that they saw as being paramount to 21st century development: women. Their book, Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, met with critical acclaim, was turned into a 3-hour documentary and also spawned a Facebook game which has raised $321,400 in charitable donations since its launch this March.

Ranging from maternal mortality to sexual abuse to education, Half the Sky paints a rather dismal picture of the challenges still facing women today. But Kristof and WuDunn spare their readers from despair by also introducing them to individual women who are working towards a better life however they can. The book raises, and also genuinely tries to answer, the urgent question: what means do you have?

But doesn’t this mean that the roles of the humanitarian activist and the journalist get blurred? “There’s a very fine line that journalists have to walk here,” Kristof warns. “It’s great to aspire to change the world with your reporting, but you can’t cover every city council meeting as if it’s the moral equivalent of genocide.”

Magazine-journalist-turned-documentary-maker Claire Ward was inspired, as a student, by the New York Times’ “Fixes” column to take a closer look at how the non-profit sector works. But after putting together The Cola Road, her film about ColaLife, a project that is bringing basic medicines to rural populations in Zambia by piggy-backing on the vast Coca-Cola distribution network, she agrees with Kristof. “’Feel-good’ land is murky territory in the world of the supposedly objective,” says Ward. Nonetheless, she is convinced the film “could teach the general public a lot about what development and social entrepreneurship look like on the ground.”

What is now known as ‘impact journalism’ is therefore about bringing practical possibilities for change to wider attention. But it should obviously remain as free and rigorous as regular news reporting. “Part of journalism is outlining not just problems but also potential solutions. But we shouldn’t be partisans, and I’m wary of becoming too closely identified with any one approach or group,” Kristof says.